Continue Reading August 6th, 2009
Demand for homes in the Washington DC metro is now outpacing supply, The Washington Post’s Elizabeth Razzi reported today. The inventory of unsold homes in June dropped to a healthy 5.1 months supply, according to a report from the local multiple listing service and Delta Associates. This is the amount of time need to sell the homes on the market at the current sales pace. Experts say a market in balance has about 6 months supply. Anything below that is considered a buyer’s market.
That doesn’t mean that sellers can raise their prices yet, but they’re offering less generous incentives, Razzi says. Home prices fell 13.2 percent in the second quarter compared to the previous year.
The metro area includes the battered Prince William County and other distant suburbs that are in terrible shape. I would guess the supply in DC and its inner suburbs such as Alexandria, Va. and Arlington, Va. are much tighter. And home prices there are likely to rise sooner.
DC, which has plentiful federal government and defense contractor jobs, is one of the country’s few economic bright spots and its housing market is a good candidate for an early rebound. Am I being too optimistic here?
Read more »
Continue Reading August 6th, 2009
You’ve heard of speed dating? It’s got nothin’ on foreclosure buying these days. In many places, anyone who wants to buy a foreclosure better act fast, or they’re going to come away with bupkus.
Read more »
Continue Reading August 6th, 2009
Another sign that the housing market is improving.
Clear Capital, which provides real estate valuation data for investors, said today that U.S. home prices jumped 5% in the quarter ending July 25 compared to the previous quarter.
The index showed an 11.2% quarter-over-quarter gain in the Midwest, a 5.3% gain in the South, a 2.4% increase in the Northeast, and a 1.1% rise in the West.
Clear Capital is trumpeting that it was the first index to report U.S. home price growth. It’s true that last month’s Clear Capital report came out a few weeks before the release of the Standard & Poor/Case-Shiller 20-city index, which showed home prices rising slightly in May, the first monthly gain in three years.
But technically, it was the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s index that was first to show an increase. The agency said in March that home prices rose 1.7% in January compared to December on a seasonally-adjusted basis.
The Clear Capital and Case Shiller price increases aren’t as significant as they might seem. It’s always best to compare home prices on a year-over-year basis to remove seasonal variations. Spring and Summer are the strongest buying seasons of the year. The indexes aren’t seasonally adjusted and, in both cases, prices were down when compared to the previous year.
(Clear Capital uses its own rolling quarterly average, which compares the most recent four months to the previous three months. It sounds confusing but it allows the company to come up with fresh quarterly data each month).
Read more »